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Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Life = made

As an avid reader of Four Four Two, I was pleasantly
surprised when one of their team tweeted me asking if they could speak to me
about our final game (and survival in the Football League) away at Burton at
the end of last season. Of course, my answer was “yes”. Apparently, they had
been following my tweets from the day and had staff at the Hereford/Torquay
match – and were looking to speak with a Barnet fan to get their side of
events. I jumped at the chance and after a number of emails were exchanged, I
was told to look out for the July edition. For those of you that haven’t seen
it:

“I was worried about the game all week. The more I
thought about it, the worse I pictured the outcome. I felt sick first thing,
but on the journey up to Burton, everyone seemed pretty upbeat. Most of them
believed we’d stay up. We’ve done it on the last day of the last two seasons –
we’re survival specialists!

When we scored early, I thought: “this is our day”. But
we were in shock when we heard that Hereford were three up. Then Burton got one
back and a draw wasn’t enough for us. As Zola stepped up to that penalty, I
thought we were doomed. My heart was in my mouth. But he skied it. That shot
saved our season.

At half time, someone said to me “Hereford could win 27-0
– but we could get a late winner and stay up”. Everyone was still strangely
confident. It got a bit mental: at one point, a rumour spread that it was 3-3
at Edgar Street. But then we scored the second. The celebrations were crazy.
Everyone was chanting Mark Hughes’ name and bundling.

We held on well and Dean Brill made a blinding save in
the final seconds. Our 992 fans – a huge following by our standards – went mad
at the end. Who’d have predicted both teams winning their game? We chanted ‘we
are Barnet, we’ll never go down’ for about 20 minutes. The players came to
celebrate with us, and everyone was elated. I didn’t celebrate that much
afterwards – just a couple of drinks. I felt relief more than anything. Every
year, so many people write us off, and every year we somehow manage to survive.

I just hope it doesn’t happen for a fourth season
running. I don’t think we could go through it all again.”